Private Ruben Pearce

A sweet alfalfa breeze ruffles the shadows while a rise of hill opens to plains of corn. Mourning doves haunt the shade of marble headstones here in the village cemetery.

“He lived, he went south, he came back home, is the simplest way to put it,” Gerald Collette tells me. Yet neither the story of Ruben Pearce nor being here in Wellington cemetery with a surgeon from the American Civil War is an everyday thing. Collette is a historian and a period re-enactor who interprets the role of a medical officer from the war that was the crucible of America. We stand beside a small granite marker decorated by two tiny flags—the Maple Leaf and the Stars and Stripes.

“He likely enlisted at Young’s Point or Sackets Harbor in New York State,” Collette describes. “He joined the army of the Potomac…the big army of the north under Grant…he became a Private in Company A Mounted Rifles…Pearce was a horseman.”

The Pearces worked the land along Consecon Creek, near Alisonville. It may have been the time of ‘bringing in the hay’ in 1860, the year that Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, made his tour of the Canadas, that something happened in the mind of Ruben Pearce. Born in 1834, Pearce was 26 years old with a wife and four children when he laid down his pitch fork and took up a gun to go to war.

“I imagine it was money…there wasn’t much available” Collette tells me as we walk the graveyard. “A lot of people could get a $300-$800 bounty…money for signing up, and they would get $13 a month wages plus a uniform and he (Pearce) would have been issued a horse.”

In April 1861, cannons fired 800 miles to the south of us at Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina, setting off the four year bloodbath of a Civil War that resounded here to the north. Soldiers for hire marched from Windsor, Newfoundland and the eastern provinces as the war reaped profits in pre-Confederation Canada. Whether for cause or reward, Private Pearce joined 50,000 Canadian-born soldiers who fought for the Union Army while another thousand of his countrymen bore the flag of the Confederate south.

“Rueben Henderson from Picton went, was shot and taken prisoner; Doctor Ross from Belleville became an emissary between Canada and Lincoln; Doctor Francis Wafer, who studied at Queen’s University, became a surgeon for the north,” Collette describes. “There are over 34 Medal of Honor recipients from Canada. Among them, two black surgeons… Abbott who looked after Lincoln and also Ruffan Augusta. Augusta got a pension and was buried at Arlington…separate from the white people.”

Tons of produce and goods crossed the border from Canada while thousands of horses were sold to the armies. The favoured horse was the ‘Canadien’, the ‘little iron horse’ that descended from the stables of France’s Louis XIV. Meanwhile here in Prince Edward, Loyalist descendants seeded every inch of ground and built the boats that got the barley to the breweries of the former Yankee enemy.

Over 700,000 soldiers and one million horses died in a carnage that ravaged the land. And Private Pearce? “He was wounded and taken prisoner in Salisbury, Virginia,” Collette answers. “That was the worst possible place…the Commandant of the prison was charged with war crimes for the way he treated the men…the prison camps were so overcrowded it was unbelievable…the Confederate camps in particular didn’t have the food, the clothing…the medicines that were also very primitive…the wounded were actually better off there believe it or not. If he (Pearce) got looked after in the prison camp his chances may have been a little better because without the medicine they used homeopathic stuff.”

Conditions in the battlefield were horrific. “If you made it the first day after an injury you had a 75 per cent chance of surviving…they knew little of sanitation, sterilization. As a surgeon you would have done your own men first and then came the enemy and then blacks were done next,” Collette goes on. “For open wounds they used mercury and an alcohol mix called ‘blue mass’…the other medicine was Laudium, an alcohol and opium pain killer that was highly addictive,” he continues. “Although surgeons were non-combatants they carried a pistol for protection of the opium.”

While the American Civil War helped spark Canadian Confederation, for those who came back, it was a memory to be forgotten. “Henderson became Chief Constable in Marysburgh Township; Doctor Ross and Lincoln remained close friends. Ross, an avid bird watcher and well known for his writings in the States, helped with the Underground Railroad. Dr. Wafer became head of Queen’s Medical School,” Collette reveals.

Add to the list Sara Emms Edwards, a noted Union spy, while Calixa Lavallée, a French Canadian writer and musician turned Union Army officer, returned to compose our official anthem. And the famed ‘Canadien’ horse? It was rescued from extinction and is now one of our national emblems.

“Pearce would have gotten his relief papers and a pension from the U.S. government after being brought north,” Collette reflects. “He would have seen horrific things, particularly being wounded,” he says looking off into the distance, “…the American Civil War Historical Society raised money for his plaque: Ruben Pearce born Oct 18, 1834. Died 1909.”

A long dry summer and the haying is on; in a nearby field a mare swishes at horseflies; the water creeps below the limestone skirt of Consecon Creek as a car crests the bridge where I stand. My thoughts are of Pearce and his coming home. When he picked up the plough, did the earth at his feet or the songbirds in the meadow soothe his days? Or the voice of the creek in spring: Did it ease the very sadness of war? If any of it brought comfort but for a moment, that is my prayer for him.